We all want happy teams. High engagement scores. Great culture surveys. And yes, those things matter.
And I know many of you are repulsed with the idea of “cracked” teams working 7 days a week in the office. We don’t all need to do that to win.
But here’s what I’ve learned after watching hundreds of SaaS companies scale: Team urgency flows downhill. Always.
If you as the CEO don’t have that burning sense of urgency, your team will mirror that energy. They’ll be good. They’ll be competent. But they won’t have that edge that separates the companies that grow 3x from the ones that grow 30%.
The Proof Is in the 2025 Pudding
Let’s talk about what real CEO urgency looks like in SaaS and B2B right now:
- Alex Karp at Palantir had his stock surge 165% in the first half of 2025. Karp — who maintains 7% body fat at age 57 — told CNBC in June 2025: “Those of us in tech cannot have a tin ear to what this is going to mean for the average person” when discussing AI. He’s been on a relentless push, publishing “The Technological Republic” in February 2025 and doing non-stop media tours while Palantir leapt above Salesforce in market value. Time magazine named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2025.
- Bill McDermott at ServiceNow just declared war at Knowledge 2025 in May: “I always said ‘nobody has to lose for us to win’. The customer is changing that narrative as we speak. And what the customer is now saying is, ‘I want somebody to lose’.” This is the most competitive language anyone’s heard from McDermott since joining ServiceNow. He’s positioning them as the AI operating system for enterprises and explicitly targeting Salesforce. ServiceNow’s fastest-growing business is now CRM.
- Frank Slootman at Snowflake literally wrote the book on this: “Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity.” Until he stepped down as CEO in February 2024 (staying as Chairman), Slootman pushed what he called “insanely confrontational” leadership. His philosophy? “CEO jobs are insanely confrontational, which is not human nature. We don’t like it. We’re not naturally confrontational. We avoid it.” He’d kill MBOs at every company because individual targets detract from organizational alignment. The result? Three successful IPOs: Data Domain, ServiceNow, and Snowflake.
- Aaron Levie at Box says “Box has never felt more like a startup than it does today other than the first 12 months of our existence.” The AI revolution has created a sense of urgency and innovation at the company that now employs 2,800 people and generated over $1 billion in revenue last year. Levie is personally using AI tools to write documents and strategy plans, research market trends, summarize materials, and build prototypes. But here’s the kicker: “I’m just finding more stuff to have the AI do — and then I end up doing more work as a result”. His take? AI won’t give us four-day work weeks because “The company that implements the four-day work week, they’ll just have a competitor that says, ‘Well, we can work five days, but also with this productivity gain'”.
What Real Urgency Looks Like
It’s not about working 100-hour weeks (though sometimes that happens). It’s about:
- Probsably being more confrontational. Slootman’s approach: “We have to relentlessly drive every second of the day, every interaction, and seek the confrontation.” That $2.4 billion Data Domain exit, the ServiceNow IPO, and Snowflake’s record IPO didn’t happen by accident.
- Working smarter AND harder. This sounds trite but it also needs to be true. Levie at Box is the perfect example: he uses AI to accelerate everything from research to strategy, but admits “I’m just finding more stuff to have the AI do — and then I end up doing more work as a result.” That’s not inefficiency – that’s competitive advantage.
- Never getting comfortable. McDermott at ServiceNow is explicitly targeting the biggest players: “CEOs are now demanding software losers.” He’s not playing defense. After building SAP from $39B to $163B in market value, he joined ServiceNow and has nearly tripled their revenue since 2019.
- Probably, being leaner. Fewer, better employees doing more. So many tech leaders are now past ‘peak employee’.
The Trickle-Down Effect
Here’s what I’ve seen happen when CEOs have real urgency:
- Engineering ships faster
- Sales cycles compress
- Customer support becomes proactive instead of reactive
- Everyone starts thinking like an owner
And when CEOs don’t have urgency:
- “We’ll get to it next quarter” becomes the default
- Competitors start winning deals they shouldn’t
- The team optimizes for comfort over growth
- Innovation slows to a crawl
The Balance
Am I saying treat your team without compassion? Absolutely not. Human-centered leaders are successful due to their ability to understand their customers and coworkers. You can have both urgency AND empathy.
The best CEOs create “productive pressure.” They set ambitious timelines, but they also give their teams the resources and support to hit them. They communicate why speed matters without creating toxic stress.
Your team is watching you. Always.
If you’re checking out at 5 PM every day, they will too. If you’re not pushing for faster iterations, neither will they. If you’re comfortable with “good enough,” that becomes the ceiling. If you are good with a hybrid environment where folks come and go when they want, they will. If you let things go because thing got harder … more and more things will be let go.
When asked about work-life balance, Jensen Huang remarked, “I work as much as I can.” That’s intensity from a $3.4 trillion company CEO. But it’s not just the mega-caps.
Look at the B2B performance data from the first half of 2025: Palantir is up 165%, ServiceNow is up 12%, while traditional SaaS like Salesforce is down 18% and Asana down 31%. The companies winning have CEOs creating what Slootman calls “productive pressure” – they set ambitious timelines and give teams the resources to hit them.
It’s Not For Everyone. CEO Resignations Are at a Record High
Here’s the flip side: CEO resignations hit an all-time high in 2024, up 24% to 2,221 departures at U.S. businesses over 25 employees. And 2025 isn’t looking better.
The casualties are telling.
- Dustin Moskovitz just stepped down as CEO of Asana in March 2025 after 17 years, with the stock plummeting 25% on the news. His reason? He wants to “focus more on his philanthropic endeavors” including addressing “potential risks from advanced AI.”
- Discord’s Jason Citron stepped down in April 2025, replaced by a former Activision Blizzard executive as the company prepares for an IPO.
- Instacart’s CEO Fidji Simo left to join OpenAI as CEO of Applications.
- Twilio’s Jeff Lawson stepped down in 2024 amid activist investor pressure after revenue growth slowed to 5% amid the company’s struggles to adapt after years of hype growth.
The pattern? The AI era is simply changing the game.
The message is clear: Either you work harder than you ever have, or you may get left behind in the Age of AI.
If nothing else, your team’s urgency starts with yours. Full stop.
